My first encounter with the dark beauty of Beijing

My first encounter with the dark beauty of Beijing

My first encounter with the dark beauty of Beijing

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Bird's Nest stadium

Forbidden city: journalists have not yet been let into the Bird's Nest stadium

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Chinese drummers practise for the opening ceremony

Rhythm: Chinese drummers practise for the opening ceremony

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Chinese people show their enthusiasm for the Games

Fans: Chinese people show their enthusiasm for the Games

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A Chinese child looks tired out by all the excitement

Patriot: A Chinese child looks tired out by all the excitement

Forbidden city: journalists have not yet been let into the Bird's Nest stadium

The Government and people of China are hoping that the Beijing Olympics will prove to the world what they have achieved. As the hours are counted down to the opening ceremony, I cannot help wondering whether they may be disappointed.

On one level, Beijing 2008's sheer, blistering achievement is indeed extraordinary. The Olympic Green takes almost an hour to cross on foot, and every corner holds a new sporting crown jewel, each the biggest, most expensive and most spectacular of its kind there has ever been and probably ever will be.

At night, the National Stadium, the Bird's Nest, is more random and more beautiful than any mere camera lens can show, its outer tendrils waving in white against a blood-red interior. The tortoise-shell of the aquatic centre, with its seven different colours, is another building that succeeds in making something large and hard into something that is soft and subtle and permeable.

Last night, tantalising music was coming from inside the Nest, as the organisers went through yet another "final rehearsal" for tomorrow's heavily embargoed opening. In the media centre, the only building we have yet been allowed inside, nearly a thousand work-desks stretch away into the distance.

For the journalists alone, there is a network of hundreds of buses, which spend their time shuttling, mostly empty, between the site and any conceivable hotel or attraction. Thousands of eager, smiling volunteers at all key points - and every 10metres in between - ensure that no one of my acquaintance has yet had to open a door.

Yet these jewels are set in a rather fouler clasp. On the morning I flew in, the pollution was so thick that I couldn't see the ground until the plane actually hit it. The Olympic buildings may be spectacular but during the day it is sometimes difficult to spot them through the euphemistically-phrased Beijing "mist".

We are staying near the stadium, Beijing's equivalent of Canning Town. But much of the rest of the city looks like Canning Town, too, having been systematically rebuilt in the past 15 years to consist largely of dual carriageways and flyovers lined with concrete highrises. The characterful old "hutongs", the low-rise alleyways where the Chinese used to live, are being obliterated. The sky is the colour of an unwashed bedsheet. In four days, the sun has been able to break through the haze for only a single afternoon.

AND beneath the very need, almost desperation, to impress it is possible to sense a real and terrible anxiety. The very grandness of the Olympic buildings, the general extravagance of provision, betrays a deep insecurity as much as national confidence. To an extent simply not understood in the West, China regards itself as having been beset by humiliation at the hands of foreigners, who, the Communist Party teaches, reduced it to ruin and penury for a century until Mao stepped forward in the 1940s to begin the restoration of national greatness.

Hosting the most perfect Olympics ever is intended as a key stage in that restoration - and thus, far more even than in any other Games, the Chinese are desperate for the next two weeks to be a triumph.

"Embarrassment during the Games could go a long way to reactivating China's old sense of victimisation at the hands of the developed, outside world," says Orville Schell, director of the Centre on US-China Relations at the Asia Society. Yet the problem with Olympics is that things can, and often do, go wrong. And even if everything does run exactly according to China's plan, will that plan, in fact, impress us?

In terms of the International Olympic Committee wish-list, Beijing, with its huge numbers of glossy new venues and highly-controlled atmosphere, gets 10 out of 10. Dictatorships and the IOC make good partners. One-and-a-half million people were ejected from their homes to build the iconic venues, with little nonsense about human rights or compensation. Vast numbers of cheap labourers did the work in record time, without undue concern about health and safety.

In a notoriously dry part of the world, nearby provinces have been drained of water to serve the Games. Fifty miles down the road, people are going thirsty so that roundabouts and road verges by the stadium can look fresh and green. Factories have been closed to cut pollution, throwing thousands out of work. "Unsightly" houses are hidden behind huge screens. Muslim restaurants near the stadium have been forced to shut on "security" grounds.

Beijing has suppressed significant parts of its real personality for the Games, packing a million migrant workers and thousands of beggars back to their home villages, banishing dog from menus, and ordering people not to go outside with bare chests, rolled-up trousers or white socks with black shoes. According to Western residents, the capital is emptier than it has been for years, reminding

them of Rome or Paris in August. If this city were an athlete, it would probably be investigated for doping.

For the next month, there are two Beijings, the badged and the unbadged. Maybe one day all cities will be like this. Those of us with big yellow Olympics cards around our necks can get across the security cordons and up close to the magnificent stadia and arenas of the Olympic Green. We can use the special Olympic lanes on choked roads and get our taxis waved through the police roadblocks. The unbadged, whose taxes have paid for it all, are reduced to gazing through distant fences.

Yet though, like any other Olympic city-dwellers, ordinary Beijingers can be irritated by some of the inconveniences, people told me again and again that they are thrilled about the Games. "It is a great opportunity for China," said one. "It shows we are a great nation," said another.

At the magnificent Southeast Corner Watchtower, part of a surviving stretch of the old Beijing city walls, I found some Chinese trainspotters (the place has a great view of the diesels chugging into the main railway station). One of them showed me the carvings in the wall, dating from the tower's occupation by foreign forces after the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 and preserved as a keenly-felt emblem of national shame. "Next week we will overcome this," he said.

These people are not trotting out some kind of officially-approved propaganda line. For the average citizen, life really has improved dramatically in the past 20 years. And whatever orders may be issued about white socks and black shoes, people have also become more free in the lifestyle they can follow, the places they can travel, the work they can do, the forbidden websites they can read (thanks to proxy servers, the so-called "Great Firewall" is not that much of an obstacle to the average internet user). Free, that is, in any way that does not affect the power of the regime.

In the coming days, there will almost certainly be more brief demonstrations by foreigners, along the lines of the Free Tibet banner-unfurling near the Olympic site yesterday. But it is highly unlikely there will be any major protest by locals. And any protest will be about a particular grievance, such as an eviction or redevelopment, rather than a call for political rights. The democracy movement has stalled. To the West's considerable surprise, the protests in London, Paris and San Francisco against the Olympic torch relay were greeted in China with nationalistic, anti-Western fury.

In Tiananmen Square, one of Beijing's last remaining Mao portraits still looks out through the murk over this most symbolic of Chinese public spaces. But the Chairman has now had to accept a role as supporting player to "Ying-Ying", one of the Olympic mascots.

More representative than any pro-democracy activists are the people having their pictures taken in front of Ying-Ying with little Chinese flags in their clenched fists. The physical face of Beijing may have changed almost totally since Mao died - the main uniform in the square is now the Adidas trainer - but the party he created is perhaps as strong as it has ever been.

Yet if there may not be major difficulties on the political front, the Games may end up disappointing Beijing in other ways. Firstly, of course, they could end up coming second to America in the medal tables, an enormous loss of face for the Chinese. If their superstar hurdling hope doesn't win gold, he might as well kill himself.

China-America (for which read China-West) will be an historic clash, with a read-over far wider than sport. The West is, as the China expert Peter Hays Gries says, "central to the construction of China's identity today; China's alter ego".

China, of course, is the world centre of manufacturing, and has almost literally been manufacturing athletes in a semiindustrial process. But is real success, in both the medal tables and the global economy, going to be about softer, more human processes that Westerners do better: creativity and inspiration?

It's notable that nearly all the iconic buildings Beijing 2008 has offered us were designed, in whole or part, by Western architects. It was equally notable that China's first offering in the Cultural Olympiad, earlier this week, was a Western symphony performance.

And although China is giving us its version of development and modernity in Beijing, it may find, to its alarm, that we don't like endless high-rises and motorways to infinity; that both we, and the people who lived in them, rather preferred the old-fashioned alleyways they are knocking down.

And a spectacular Olympics is never simply about spectacular buildings, or even athletic performance, alone. For the duration of the Games, the authorities have closed down cafes, removed outside tables, ended dancing at gay clubs, and regimented Beijing to the extent that this is already being called the "no-fun Games".

For the Chinese, there may be such a thing as trying too hard. In their desire for a perfect Olympics, they are in danger of undermining, in the all-important eyes of the outside world, the very things that make the event a success.